News on the Australian Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is in many people’s minds the Next Big Thing: And that Thing is a Thing that Australia has a strong position in.

One of the early movers on IoT was Ninja Blocks who brought out a nifty little block that connected up to a wide range of sensors and, well, things a couple of years ago. They got a great deal of publicity, made a nice device that garnered a lot of support and then seemed to go walkabout for a while. Their corporate attention shifted from the initial hardware package to becoming the back-end glue for anyone’s hardware. It then shifted again to the beautiful-looking Ninja Sphere – a more consumer-oriented piece of hardware – that they hope will take the world by storm. Ninja Blocks CEO, Daniel Friedman was recently quoted as saying “Our focus right now is on making the Ninja Sphere a household name in the US.” With a fair chunk of institutional backing behind them (they got another $800,000 in the last few days) Ninja Blocks is well-positioned to make further waves, although it’s a bit concerning that they seem to have left the original Ninja Blocks hardware, platform and user-base behind them along the way.

Ninja Sphere itself looks wonderful.It’s a stunningly designed smart home controller including everything from gesture control to in-built support for a huge range of devices. It’s coming in at a hefty US$329 and you’ll likely need a couple to cover a house, but it’s clearly going to be a thing of much geeky envy in the coming months.

Xped is another Australian company working on the IoT; they’re positioned much more like Ninja Blocks started out with a product designed to facilitate people tinkering with linked networks of devices rather than a polished consumer product. That said, their aim is to allow people to access devices without programming or deep knowledge: “What is needed is a simple solution that allows us to interact with devices as simply as we interact with websites.” Xped’s solution is:

Xped creates the world’s first Device Browser for a new generation of device. Simpler to design, simpler to use. Developers…say goodbye to writing device apps. Users…simply tap a Near Field Communication (NFC) enabled smartphone to a device, and it’s ready to control! Eliminates having an app for every brand or type of device. Take control of devices in your life in a simple and natural way.

It’s refreshing to see this level of Australian activity in what is without doubt one of the coming areas and I hope that both do well. If you are a maker interested in IoT it’s certainly worth taking a good look at Xped and thinking about backing their Kickstarter campaign.